I used to love opening my inbox and seeing an email from someone who had read and enjoyed one of my books. Now, when I see a message like that, I cringe.

The reason is that these days, they’re far more likely to be AI-generated spam than genuine human connections. They often impersonate authors or film directors (I had one the other day from James Patterson) or claim to be from respectable real-life book clubs or literary festivals.

What they all have in common is that they work very hard to convince me that I’m a great and woefully underappreciated writer whose books should be getting much more attention than they are. They pile on the flattery, saying how much the book in question stayed with them and how genuinely shocked they are that it’s not higher up the bestseller lists. I delete them on sight, so I don’t have a lot of examples, but here’s an extract from one that came in the other day:

“Your sharp look at online identities, the tension between image and reality, and the way love presses against a web of lies stayed with me. One small word I learned from the book is truth.”

Most of the emails pull off the unique AI trick of including masses of specific detail and yet still seeming weirdly generic. They muse on the motivations of my characters, praise my innovative narrative techniques, and bring up highly specific plot details to show how closely they read my book and how much they loved it. Yet the fakery is still easy to spot, not because of the widely publicised ‘AI tells’ like em-dashes and “it’s not X, it’s Y” constructions, but because of an uncanny emptiness. Writing exists to help one human communicate with another, and at no point does AI writing, no matter how grammatical or polished, how folksy or humorous, ever quite manage to convince you that there’s a real person on the other end of the line.

Often, the emails strive to sound genuine by using words like “genuinely” a lot. Today’s arrival had four instances:

“I want to start by saying something I genuinely mean: A Virtual Love is not just another novel about the Internet. It is a compelling and very entertaining look at the complexities of our hyperreal age, and it is an insightful and witty exploration of the disconnect between image and reality, truth and appearance, and whether love and sincere sentiment can overcome the short term thrills of social media.”

“That is not a plot convenience. It is a genuinely accurate depiction of how sustained deception works, and it gives the novel real psychological weight.”

“My work sits at the intersection of storytelling, audience psychology, and digital visibility, helping authors ensure their books do not simply get published, but genuinely get discovered.”

“Over the past several years I have worked with authors across literary fiction, contemporary romance, and culturally engaged fiction, helping position their books in ways that build credibility, expand reach, and connect with the readers who are actively searching for exactly the kind of witty, insightful, and genuinely entertaining work this novel provides.”

They never ask for money upfront. “James Patterson”, for example, just wrote to say how much he loved my book and to ask an innocent question: “As an author, I am curious how “On the Holloway Road” came together. Did the characters come first, with the road built to give them somewhere to go, or did the journey arrive first, and the characters became the people who could walk it?”

However, I assume that a money grab is where it’s going at some point down the line. The flattery is the setup, and people who respond get hit with the pitch: presumably some kind of expensive book-marketing scheme. Both the Society of Authors in the UK and the Author’s Guild in the USA have warned of a rise in this kind of email scams targeting authors.

As entertaining as it can be to watch large language models genuinely trying to sound genuine, I find it sad that reader letters, once a source of joy, are now something I presume to be spam. I’m pretty sure I could tell a real human email from this AI slop, but what about an email from a real reader who doesn’t feel confidence in their writing and uses ChatGPT to help them compose the message? I might well mark it as spam these days.

More importantly, as the volume increases, will authors simply stop reading fan letters, and will readers stop writing them? History is full of famous fan letters, whether it’s Charles Dickens writing out of the blue to George Eliot or an 18-year-old James Joyce sending a gushing letter to Henrik Ibsen. It would be a shame if that long history ended.

Spam, of course, has been around for a long time—I wrote an article about it way back in 2003—and we’ve found ways to deal with it and sort the real from the fake. Probably the same will happen with this new wave, which I’m sure is not just hitting authors. What makes this type tricky is how dramatically AI has reduced the cost and time needed to create something believable (or at least almost-believable). But with new EU rules forcing the major AI models to introduce watermarking, perhaps it will be easier for email providers to identify AI-generated messages and divert them automatically to the Spam folder.

In the meantime, I’ll keep deleting the fawning AI-generated emails. The good thing is that writing this post has prompted me to look back through my old emails for some real, human-written messages, and they warmed my heart. Here’s one from 2 July 2012:

Dear Andrew, I just finished reading your book and felt compelled to email you – I don’t twitter or tweet hence the old fashioned correspondence.

I’ve lived in Islington all my life and love reading about the local area and places that I’ve walked along or can relate to. There is something quite comforting about the Holloway Road even though most of it could be considered quite grotty but it’s also probably true to say that most of life exists there and I loved the way this was reflected in the book. I also loved that I could go from completely despising Neil to wanting to give him a hug in a matter of seconds. I feel that it’s going to be one of those books that will stay with me for a long time and keep me reflecting on why we crave adventure but that often the idea is far more exciting than the reality.

On another level, it has, as often happens, reinforced my love of London with all its faults, beauty, colourful characters and life.